WP Engine - Customer Service Department of the Year

Company: WP Engine, Austin, TXCompany Description: WP Engine is the top dedicated WordPress hosting company in the world. Founded in 2012 by entrepreneur, Jason Cohen, WP Engine employees 171 people within their Customer Experience team and over 400 overall. In addition, WP Engine has recently been ranked the Top Place to Work in Austin (Austin American-Statesman).Nomination Category: Customer Service Department CategoriesNomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year – Computer Software - 100 or More Employees

Nomination Title: WP Engine

Tell the story about what this nominated department achieved since the beginning of July 2015 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes: TEXT REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION

WP Engine, a seven year old company based in Austin, Texas, is the global, leading digital experiences platform for the WordPress content management system. Our Customer Experience team, the largest in our industry, provides 24/7/365 technical support via live chat, tickets and phone to 60,000 customers with over 500,000 websites in 140 countries.

In 2016, we experienced very strong, double-digit customer growth while delivering industry-leading customer satisfaction rates with barely a double-digit growth in team members. This team of passionate techs solved over 233,000 tickets (67% increase) with a 97% satisfaction rate, handled 70,000 phone calls (4% increase), and 387,000 chats (121% increase) with a Net Promoter Score of 79. We are proud to service customers such as Nike, Microsoft, Country Music Awards, AMD, Motley Fool and Jobvite.

In April 2016, we made the strategic decision to eliminate our customers’ ability to initiate support requests via ticket, our least efficient channel. Shifting those team members to live chat allowed us to expand chat to 24/7/365 to better serve our international customers and provide a real-time, human interaction for every issue.

The result? We’ve decreased our average live chat wait time from minutes to seconds, improved resolution time from over a for tickets to minutes for live chat, with 96% first chat resolution rate. Despite the 121% increase in chats last year, the efficiencies we’ve realized directly drove improvements in our gross margin, making this one of the most successful initiatives in WP Engine history -- both for our customers’ experience and for our financial strength.

In September we expanded our global presence with the opening of our Limerick, Ireland office. As our third Technical Support location, we now have a team of 12 talented individuals in less than three months with plans to more than double the team in 2017.

In addition, we provide 24/7/365 support on Twitter and Facebook. In 2016, WP Engine Support (@wpesupport) exceeded 300,000 impressions and engagement surpassed 3,700. More impressively, 81% of inbound tweets were positive or neutral, which according to Hootsuite, is the best they have seen from a support organization.

Continuous improvement is in our DNA. Support Operations is a vital part of our team, enabling our front-line Support to operate at scale. Responsible for the policies, processes, planning, training, internal scheduling and reporting results for our support services, this team completed five major initiatives last year to drive our customers’ success:

The leadership team at WP Engine fundamentally believes that the outcomes we have achieved are a direct result of the culture of our workplace, and in particular, led by the passion of our Customer Experience team. For the third year in a row, WP Engine was named a top workplace in Austin, Texas by the Austin Business Journal. With very lowonly voluntary turnover, WP Engine’s Customer Experience team believes that every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to listen, learn, serve and improve. As a result, we are honored to have extremely high customer retention in 2016. Please visit our website to hear the Voice of our Customer and thank you for your consideration of this Stevie Award.